


After Hours

by gnimmish



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-10-01
Updated: 2018-10-01
Packaged: 2019-07-23 09:18:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16156142
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gnimmish/pseuds/gnimmish
Summary: “You know, given that it’s coming up on four in the morning,” Tina remarks, still sounding grumpy – though gently, almost affectionately so, “if this is anything, it’s breakfast. Not supper.”Fluff, set just after the events of COG (so will eventually be canon divergent), Newt and the gang are back at the Ministry of Magic in London, in the small hours of the morning. The Americans want whatever passes for coffee round here, Jacob wants pumpkin pie, Newt wants Tina, and Leta wants to make sure he doesn't wait too long.





	After Hours

**Author's Note:**

> No spoilers for the events of COG (obvs, since it hasn't come out yet), and this will probably be rendered canon divergent once the film arrives, but the recent flurry of promo images and the final trailer has me all worked up so this happened. Enjoy!

 

Sometime after everything is concluded – as concluded as it can be, for now – Newt is ushered out of his brother’s office to wait for him to finish making up his reports. It’s nearly three in the morning. The Ministry is about as empty as it ever gets, and unnervingly quiet, and Newt has a throbbing head ache and is desperately, desperately tired. Though he’s been back from Paris for only a few hours the events that transpired there feel like they took place days ago already.

The sight he’s greeted with in the hallway outside of Theseus’ office suggests that Tina, Queenie, Leta and Jacob feel rather similarly.

Jacob is sound asleep on a bench with his head in Queenie’s lap, one shoe hanging from the tips of his toes. Queenie’s half wilted over him, her eyes drifting shut. Tina’s on the floor amongst a stack of her own paperwork, filling it in about as enthusiastically as a prisoner picking out the means of their own execution. Leta’s pacing in a way that’s startlingly reminiscent of Theseus, the clip-clip-clipping of her heels the only percussive interruption of the sound of Jacob snoring, and the scrape of Tina’s quill on parchment.

Newt sinks back against the closed door behind him. “Good evening, everyone.”

“Technically,” Tina checks her watch, “it’s good morning.”

Queenie makes a low, pained sound in the back of her throat. Newt feels his skull contract in sympathy. Leta casts him a helpless look.

“Isn’t there – tea, somewhere around here?” He asks, after a moment’s hesitation. “Kitchens?”

“Kitchens?” Jacob abruptly sits up, apparently less asleep than he’d initially appeared. “With – like – food?”

“And coffee?” Tina also suddenly looks very awake.

“Coffee,” Queenie blinks, “oh my god, I would die.”

“Kitchens, yes,” Leta nods, “and I believe they have coffee –  they’re on the floor above – shall we?”

“Yes,” Tina scrambles up, scattering papers everywhere, knocking over her inkwell in the process, a pool of scarlet ink leaking across the floor and staining the ankle of her stocking, “oh, no – ”

“Oh honey,” Queenie sighs and gets up to help her.

“No, no, I got it,” Tina waves her off, giving her wand a practiced flick – the papers all obediently pile themselves back into the right order, though she can’t quite get the ink stain off her stocking.

“I’ll soak it for you later,” Queenie pats her on the elbow affectionately. Tina has flushed a little, and it abruptly occurs to Newt that she’s embarrassed – that she’s just made a clumsy mess of herself in front of Newt and the relative stranger she has, however needlessly, been assuming he was engaged to until quite recently. He realises he should not be staring at her – that being stared at often makes people feel more self-conscious, not less so. So he carefully averts his gaze – however much he likes the way the dim lights of the hallway cast the shadows of her eyelashes down her cheeks, give her dark eyes a soft sort of glow, her fine, delicate fingers deft as she slips her wand back into her sleeve – staring is not polite. How many times as a boy did his mother chide him about such things? And Theseus after her.

“This way,” Leta beckons them, clip-clip-clipping as she goes.

Newt is seized with an odd, time out of time sort of a feeling – perhaps because the odd hour, the length of the day that is still somehow dragging on, and on, and on. They’re walking the halls of the Ministry, in that sort of listless way that he sometimes wondered the halls at Hogwarts with Leta late at night – sneaking into the kitchens to talk to the house elves and pilfer biscuits or make cheese on toast. Chatting up the paintings that wouldn’t tell on them. Avoiding Jeeves.

But the Ministry halls don’t feel anything like as kind and friendly as the halls of Hogwarts did, and the woman that walks beside Newt now is no longer his best friend.

The kitchens are cavernous, of course – there’s a pantry the size of a bedroom in the back, three long, empty tables reaching from end to end of the room, shelves upon shelves of crockery and silverwear, one wall lined with cupboards containing goodness knows what, another containing only five deep, stone sinks and a wine rack  stretching from floor to ceiling. And there is a small army of house elves sleeping in hammocks in the rafters. As far as Newt knows, the Ministry has several kitchens, and this is likely one of the smaller ones – he still sees it take Jacob, Queenie and Tina by surprise. Nothing much like this in MACUSA, evidentially.

“Oh don’t trouble yourselves,” he glances up at the tell-tale rustle of a number of house elves rousing themselves, “we can provide for our own needs. Please, stay in bed.”

He sees a small face peering suspiciously at him from the shadows above, but none of them come down.

“Tea?” Leta has opened a cupboard over a deep stone sink. “And I believe there’s coffee somewhere…”

“Please,” Queenie flops into the nearest chair. “My head’s gonna fall off if I don’t get some caffeine – Jacob, honey, please stop thinking about food, I’m starving.”

“Sorry,” Jacob squeezes her shoulders affectionately.

“We have at least enough bread for you to make toast, if you’d like?” Leta offers, “and… yes, Theseus has hidden the good biscuits again… let me see…”

She begins rummaging amongst a set of tins. Newt snorts. Theseus used to hide sweets and biscuits from him when they were boys, too. Apparently this habit has now extended to his adult colleagues.

He investigates the coffee – the jar looks respectable enough – and sets a kettle on the nearest stove to boil, sensing that if his American compatriots don’t get some soon they really will all wither into dust at the slightest provocation.

Tina is laying out her paperwork on the end of one of the tables, apparently determined to finish it still, though, after a moment’s hesitation, she also kicks off her shoes and ink-stained stockings, grimacing as she examines them.

“You got any stuff for actual baking round here?” Jacob is curiously investigating a pantry, “you know – No-Maj style? Only I got a hankering for pie.”

“Oh, pie,” Queenie sighs, collapsing over a worksurface with such a look of anguished longing Newt feels genuinely sorry for her.

“Yeah I could whip something up,” Jacob shrugs, “you want pumpkin pie, sweetie? Or rhubarb?”

“Pumpkin,” Queenie nods, decisively.

“I’m sure the ingredients can’t be that hard to come by round here,” Newt scurries to help Jacob search, “the ministry has all sorts.”

Out of the corner of his eye, he can see Tina filling one of the sinks with soapy water and dropping her stockings in to soak – he tries not to stare, truly he does, and certainly he glances away the moment she looks up. The nape of her neck continues to be distracting, even as he tries to help Jacob fetch flour down from a particularly high shelf.

“Aha!” Leta holds up a packet of chocolate digestives triumphantly. “Something to tide you over a little, at least. Don’t tell Theseus I know where he keeps them.”

She tosses the packet to Tina, who catches them with a wry smile.

The Americans have never had digestive biscuits before – let alone chocolate ones – but they meet with immediate, enthusiastic approval from Jacob, who delightedly begins trying to pick apart what they’re made of, and from Queenie, who only seems happy to have something sweet to eat. Tina munches quietly – she has gone back to her paperwork, barefoot, winding her ankles around the legs of her chair like a child would.

The coffee, however, meets with immediate disgust from everyone.

“What?” Newt asks, perturbed by their expressions.

“That,” Tina intones, emphatically, “is not coffee.”

“Ugh, no,” Jacob thrusts his mug away from him, “Is this what wizard coffee tastes like?”

“No!” Queenie looks offended by the very idea.

“Apparently, it’s what British coffee tastes like,” Tina shakes her head.

“You got all this magical stuff in here and you can’t come up with a decent cup’a joe?” Jacob raises his eyebrows incredulously.

“I can fix this,” Queenie jumps up, “I make the best coffee in the whole of MACUSA. Show me your beans.”

“And I need eggs, butter, sugar – and pumpkin – and more butter – lots of butter,” Jacob disappears back into the pantry, “I need pie to get the taste of whatever the hell that not-coffee is out of my mouth!”

Queenie officially declares the Ministry’s coffee beans to be ‘older than Merlin’s beard’, and begins trying to coax them back to freshness with a series of small, delicate spells Newt has never heard before. He is, once again, reminded never to underestimate Queenie Goldstein – her magic lacks the explosive strength he’s seen in Tina’s or the book-learned precision of Leta’s – but there’s an instinctive artistry – something fine, almost ornate – to the way Queenie wields power. She’s no less skilful than any of her friends – just in ways that are subtler and more tricksy than he’s used to.

Jacob collects another bag of flour, a jar of sugar, two blocks of butter, and crows delightedly when he finds a stack of large, fresh pumpkins in the back of the pantry.

“Who stockpiles these things?” He asks, hauling out the best looking of them.

“Pumpkin pasties are popular amongst ministry staff,” Leta puts in – she is perched on the nearest table, legs delicately crossed, finishing off the chocolate digestives, “do you not have them in America?”

“No, but now I wanna try ‘em,” Jacob sets the pumpkin down with a grin. “One thing at a time though, I guess. Ah – someone wanna help me carve this up?”

Queenie makes a deft gesture with her wand and the pumpkin falls apart into neat segments, seeds and entrails spinning up into the air out of the way – she winks at Jacob as she does it and Jacob goes extremely pink.

“I’ll take those,” Newt guides the seeds back down into a bowl, “the nifflers are rather fond of the seeds.”

“You know I mostly prefer my own way of baking,” Jacob is already measuring flour and butter into a bowl, still pink, “but I’m never gonna miss having to cut up a pumpkin the hard way.”

Queenie ruffles his hair, and Jacob’s blush deepens.

He seasons the pumpkin and puts it into an oven to roast. As he works, the kitchen begins to smell like cinnamon and nutmeg – he sprinkles more of both into the sugar he uses, works the butter and flour together with his fingers, his sleeves rolled up past his elbows, whistling. Here then, is Jacob’s own sort of magic – Newt pauses to admire his friend as he pulls soft, raw pastry dough together as deftly as any wizard could do with a wand: confident, masterful – artful, like Queenie. His movements are part instinct, part pleasure, part practice. He’s tired and raw after days of exhaustive stress – but he’s home anywhere that there’s a kitchen and dough to be worked.

Queenie is humming to whatever Jacob’s whistling – it’s a muggle tune, Newt realises. He’s heard it before, somewhere in America – Jacob had mentioned something about music halls and vauderville being amongt his favourite distractions from the drudgery of life at the cannery. He knew half a dozen songs by heart. He wonders whether the notes of any muggle song have ever been heard in the Ministry walls before. He wonders if Queenie and Jacob understand how revolutionary they are – a muggle and a witch, elbow to elbow as they work, putting supper together from magically restored coffee beans and hand-baked pie, singing, flirting, safe and happy.

Newt catches Tina’s eye across her paperwork, and sees her smile.

Jacob rolls fresh pastry into a tin and trims off the excess, which Queenie immediately starts nibbling.

“There’s raw egg in that!” Tina chides her, and Queenie only shrugs.

“Worth the risk.” She offers a piece to Newt, who can’t help himself – even unbaked, it smells delightful, and he’s not disappointed. The dough is rich, sweet and buttery. He resists the urge to ruffle Jacob’s hair himself.

Leta eats too, somehow making even the consumption of raw pastry look elegent – and Tina’s indignant snort only leads Queenie to offer her the last of it – which she takes, casting her sister a dirty look.

“I get some kinda no-maj food poisoning from this, I’m not coming to your wedding,” she informs Queenie, who only laughs then pouts, mockingly.

“Don’t be so grumpy, Teenie-Tina.”

Newt doesn’t notice Leta coming to lean against the cupboard next to him until she clears her throat, startling him out of his thoughts – then she gives him a gentle nudge, glancing pointedly at Tina. “I like her.”

Tina has got up from the table, stretching stiff arms and cracking ink-stained knuckles, her back half turned to them. She yawns, and mutters something grumpy under her breath then pushes her hair out of her eyes with slow, tired fingers, and Newt feels his heart contract.

 “Yes, so do I.”

Leta is still watching him, then gently takes his elbow, guiding him to an angle that will keep them from being overheard. “Were you planning on… acting on that fact at any point in the foreseeable future?”

Newt glances at her, wide-eyed. Leta’s expression is gently mischievous, but not unkind.

“I – in what way?” He asks, blinking.

Leta rolls her eyes at him. “You know perfectly well _in what way_.”

Newt swallows, because he does – of course he does – he’s a grown man, he has at least some general understanding of what is expected of him in these circumstances. But also he doesn’t know at all. A life time of handling unpredictable creatures has taught him that there is a vast gulf between an intellectual understanding and a practical grasp of his subject – and he has no… practical grasp. Of any kind. With women. Except, of course, the one stood next to him – and given that she is now engaged to his brother, he’s not sure that she counts in any meaningful way.

Leta takes pity on him. “Perhaps start with the suggestion of dinner?”

“Ah,” Newt has to admit that sounds… practical. “Yes.”

He considers Tina again, momentarily. She has returned to the sink, hanging over it as she washes her stockings, her brow drawn in a look of almost comical concentration. The fine plane of her back and the way her fringe is sticking to her forehead are both faintly overwhelming – there are soap bubbles on her nose. He wants, powerfully, to go over there and touch her.

He glances nervously at Leta. “What would that entail, precisely?”

Leta snorts – then suddenly draws herself up to the fullness of her five feet three inches (four inches in heels) and puts her head on one side, pulling a face he hasn’t seen her make since their school days. She deepens her voice, comically, and widens her eyes, clasps a dramatic hand to her chest.

“ _Oh dearest Miss Goldstein, I think you’re ever so pretty, would you like to come and eat sandwiches in my suitcase with me_?”

Newt stifles a surprised bubble of laughter. “I can’t possibly sound like that!”

“You absolutely do,” Leta’s mouth quirks, affectionately, “I’ve had many, many years to perfect my impressions of the Scamander brothers.”

Newt shakes his head. “Do you still do Theseus?”

“I should hope so,” Leta’s eyes are bright with amusement, “the day Theo can’t take my making fun is the day we shall have to call off the wedding.”

Newt tries to picture Theseus politely tolerating Leta’s droll sense of humour and uncanny ability to impersonate almost anyone she sets her mind to (at Hogwarts she could do surprisingly entertaining pastiches of anyone from Nearly Headless Nick to Dumbledore), finds his brain coming up against a discomforting lack of data. Of course, he’s spent so long avoiding them, he has no real idea of how they truly function as a couple – what dynamic exists privately between them, when one or both of them isn’t simply shepherding him while he politely avoids looking either of them in the face.

That they do happen to exist outside of his personal angst, as two people who love each other, in the same deep, true and comfortable way that Queenie and Jacob love each other, is not a thought he’s ever let himself dwell on for long before now. Too alien and unpleasant.

Leta has taken his protracted silence for something other than the troubling contemplation of her relationship with his brother.

“You really ought to ask her,” she tells him, sincerely now. “She’s not going to turn you down.”

Newt nods, bites at his lip.

“It won’t be hard,” Leta assures him, giving him another gentle nudge, “you suggest somewhere pleasant at a decent time. You find yourself a suit that fits, for once, and you bring her flowers and tell her she’s pretty – and open doors for her and pull out her chair and such. You really wouldn’t have a hard time mastering it, Newt, she’s already so endeared to you.”

“You make it sound very simple.”

“Well it is – with the right person.”

Newt nods, then glances at her sidelong, steeling himself. “If I had asked you – to dinner. When we were at school. Would you have gone?”

For a moment he’s sure he’s made her uncomfortable and that she will refuse to answer him. But she only seems to be considering the question. “I think I would have, yes. At one point. I was waiting for you to ask me to the Yule ball, you know.”

Newt blinks. “The Yule – but you said you hated the whole to-do!”

“Well that’s rather something one says when one’s a lonely sixteen year old who knows that no one will ever ask her to dance,” Leta shrugs, delicately. “I really thought you would ask me, though. But you never did.”

“No,” Newt swallows. He’d agonised over the idea for months – he’d even thought about exactly how he would do it. But then she’d insisted she disliked the pretence of balls and everything associated with them so they’d skipped it and spent the night revising together in the library instead. “I’m afraid I was never very good at – that sort of communication back then. Or now, as it happens.”

Leta laughs, softly, and Newt is seized with the strange fragility of how his life has turned out. But for a nerve ending or two failing him at a key moment at sixteen, he might have managed to choke out an invitation to her and she might have accepted and then where would they be? Would he have ever been expelled? Taken up his field of study? Left London?

Would he have ever met Tina?

That idea, more than any, fills him with a strange, slow dread.

Tina is hanging her stockings up now – pushing her hair back out of her eyes, pleased with herself. Merlin’s beard he can’t imagine not knowing her – so strange and stubborn and lovely.

Leta seems to be working her way up to saying something, knitting and unknitting her fingers – it’s a nervous habit that Newt remembers well. The first time he saw it, they’d both been eleven years old and the sorting hat had just been placed on her head.

“I didn’t mean to fall in love with him, you know,” Leta begins, abruptly, her gaze down cast. “I simply happened like that. Like something natural and unstoppable. Like a tide coming in. I couldn’t help a minute of it. And I wouldn’t change it if I could. But I wish it hadn’t cost me your friendship, Newt.”

Newt bites his lip. It’s not as if she owes him any sort of explanation for her own heart, of course. Though something in the delicate admission that he had been hurt – that she understood he’d been hurt – feels like a relief.

He can’t begrudge her what makes her happy – especially if she feels for Theseus anything like what he feels for Tina.

“I don’t think it’s cost you my friendship,” he murmurs, looking away, giving her a moment to brush the tears from her eyelashes so that they can both pretend they were never there to begin with. “Not really.”

She squeezes his wrist, tightly. Her grip is steadying and familiar. He can feel it, and look at Tina, and believe Leta when she tells him that Tina won’t turn him down. That she is _endeared_ , however desperately difficult it is for him to believe, in his heart of hearts, that anyone should be endeared to him in any way whatsoever.

“I think things have turned out as they needed to, don’t you?” Leta asks, softly, following the line of his gaze.

Newt nods, slowly.

“Don’t wait too long with this one,” she gives his wrist another squeeze before letting go, “she seems a little less forgiving than I am.”

Newt stifles a laugh.

Jacob is busying himself with the pumpkin, taken from the oven now – he scrapes the heat-softened flesh from its skin into another large bowl, then begins to beat in more cinammon, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, spoonfuls of sticky, dark brown sugar, half a carton of cream and two more eggs.

The mixture forms a thick batter the colour of terracotta, smelling strongly of Halloween and Hogwarts and other childhood things. As Newt comes back to the centre of the room to observe his friend’s handywork, his stomach begins to rumble.

“There,” Jacob carefully pours the pumpkin mixture into the waiting pastry case, “nearly done. Queenie, honey, you’re gonna have to help me out if we wanna eat before dawn.”

“Want me to bake it up for you?” Queenie produces her wand again, “just give me a sec, coffee’s nearly done.”

The coffee also smells rather good – Queenie has freshened the coffee beans, roasted them, ground them and filtered the resulting fine, black powder through boiling water into a teapot (for lack of a coffee pot), with a series of complicated, wordless spells Newt couldn’t place. He supposes she must do the same every day during the course of her work at MACUSA, and wonders how many other tea witches the world over are wasting their talents on boring men in offices instead of taking over the world the way they so clearly ought to be.

“Oh, _Merlin’s beard_ that’s excellent,” Leta murmurs when she tastes it. “Don’t give this to the Ministry officials, their poor old heads will explode.”

“She’s a genius,” Jacob squeezes Queenie’s arm, affectionately, and Newt watches Queenie go pink with pride, “ain’t no one works coffee beans like my Queenie.”

“Okay, but you gotta give her sister a cup before you decide to get all mushy,” Tina holds out her hand for a mug from the other end of the table, “I’m nowhere near caffeinated enough to be able to take you two making eyes at each other all over this kitchen.”

“Only if you put that quill down for a sec,” Queenie holds a mug just out of her sister’s reach, “you gotta take a break.”

“I’m nearly done!”

“So you’ll be nearly done in the morning,” Queenie shrugs, “you’re gonna work yourself into an early grave, Teenie, I swear – put the quill down, come sit over here, have some supper like a civilised witch.”

Tina grimaces, but Newt can see she’s already given in by the slack that hits her shoulders, the exhaustion bruising her eyes.

“Fine.”

Queenie begins to set the pie baking with a spell as her sister comes to join them at the other end of the table, sliding into a chair next to Newt. “You know, given that it’s coming up on four in the morning,” she remarks, still sounding grumpy – though gently, almost affectionately so, “if this is anything, it’s breakfast. Not supper.”

“I don’t care what we call it, so long as we get to eat it,” Queenie quips, setting the pie down – freshly baked it smells like autumn, like ancient rites and recent victories, like home, like friendship. Newt sips appreciatively from his coffee mug as Jacob slices up the pie, and Leta joins them on Newt’s other side.

Tina leans back, reflexively, automatically, waving plates off the nearest shelf, cutlery out of a drawer, setting the table just exactly as Newt suspects she always does at home. He tries and fails not to stare – though she doesn’t seem to mind.

They are still eating when Theseus arrives, rubbing his eyes, yawning widely, and demanding to know _what in the ruddy hell smells so good_.

 


End file.
